by Yoni Hersch and Israel Hayom Staff
New book says President Obama did nothing to help demonstrators in Iran's Green Revolution of 2009 to protect nuclear deal negotiations • Bloomberg: Obama administration tried from the beginning to turn Iran from "foe to friend."
A support rally for defeated
presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi in Tehran, June 2009
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Photo credit: AFP 
U.S. President Barack Obama decided not to
support the Iranian opposition during the 2009 elections to protect
secret negotiations he was holding with Tehran on its nuclear program, a
recently published book alleges.
"The Iran Wars" by Jay Solomon of The Wall
Street Journal, several sections of which were published by the
Bloomberg news agency Wednesday, holds that Obama actively refrained
from assisting the demonstrators. He ignored advisers who told him to
support the opposition in Iran, even ordering the CIA to sever ties with
opposition leader.
"The Agency has contingency plans for
supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world. This includes
providing dissidents with communications, money and in extreme cases
even arms," Solomon writes. "But in this case the White House ordered it
to stand down.
Demonstrations broke out in June 2009 after
then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of elections
that many in Iran felt were rigged. From the beginning, Obama and the
White House downplayed the demonstrations' importance, and when he
finally did speak about them, he refrained from mentioning election
fraud.
The book also mentions that the administration
received contradicting messages: On one hand, exiled Iranians pushed
for U.S. intervention, while on the other hand, revolutionaries from
inside Iran saw American assistance as "a kiss of death" for the
movement. In the end, the U.S. did nothing.
"Obama from the beginning of his presidency
tried to turn the country's ruling clerics from foes to friends," writes
Eli Lake, a Bloomberg columnist. "It was an obsession. And even though
the president would impose severe sanctions on the country's economy at
the end of his first term and beginning of his second, from the start of
his presidency, Obama made it clear the U.S. did not seek regime change
for Iran."
Solomon describes the process that led to the
U.S. signing the Iran deal on July 14, 2015, as well as the "red lines
[that] were demolished." In the same paragraph, the book quotes U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry, who said in a 2016 interview with
Solomon, "So many wars have been fought over misunderstandings,
misinterpretations, lack of effective diplomacy. War is the failure of
diplomacy."
Diplomacy may have been successful in preventing war
with Iran, Solomon writes, but not in the Middle East. "There is no
guarantee that an Obama intervention would have been able to topple
[Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei back in 2009, when his people flooded the
streets to protest an election the American president wouldn't say was
stolen," Lake said. "But it was worth a try."
Yoni Hersch and Israel Hayom Staff
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=35921
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